Presidential mailbox: Make school affordable! edition

So I got a new email from Mr. Obama. Lets review it.

Michelle and I wouldn't be in the White House today if it weren't for our college educations.
It wasn't cheap. We didn't finish paying off our student loans until about nine years ago.

You graduated from Harvard in 1991, finished paying off school debts 2004. That’s 13 years. Of course, a Harvard law school debt is a large one. And working as a Lecturer and author until 2004 probably didn’t help paying off that large debt.

That's why it's been a personal mission of mine to make higher education more affordable for more Americans -- and starting today, I'm hitting the road to talk about real reforms to fundamentally rethink how we pay for college in this country.

Do tell.

Right now, the average student who takes out loans to pay for school graduates with more than $26,000 in debt. Something's got to change -- it's not enough just to tinker around the edges. We've got to shake up the current system.

Agreed. Let’s shake it up. But the question is, how?

My plan won't be popular with everybody, especially those who profit from the way things are. But we owe it to our students to make sure that our colleges are working for them.
While we'll need Congress' help to get some of this done, my administration will continue to do what we can to make sure quality, affordable higher education is in reach for millions more young Americans.

Like what?

So far, we've taken some good steps forward. We've published college scorecards to ensure that families are getting the best information as they pick a school, doubled funding for Pell grants, and established a college tax credit. And thanks to the income-based repayment program, which caps student loan payments based on new graduates' incomes, 1.6 million young Americans can keep more money in their pockets.

You mean you’ve made it easier to take on more debt and are giving away more money? Awesome. I’m sure that is going to bring down the cost of college everywhere. Its just basic economics: Free Money = Lower Prices. Everybody knows that.

But there's much more we can and should do -- this is key to creating a better bargain for the middle class.
That's something I've talked a lot about -- every day, I think about what I can do to live up to it.
That's why I'm calling on Congress to tackle rising tuition costs and pass reforms, so families can get a better bargain when it comes to getting a world-class education.
I'm counting on OFA supporters to be part of this fight. Not much gets done in Washington without the voices of people like you.
Add your name:
http://my.barackobama.com/College-Should-Be-Affordable
Thanks,
Barack

HOW?!?!! “Tackle rising tuition costs” sounds like price controls to me. And we all know how well that works. But since not much gets done without my voice, I better go sign my name to this vague policy-less policy on your website. (I’ll be right back!)

PS – Shaking the system up does not mean allowing more debt. It means doing drastic things to reduce the actual cost of college… like saying “Hey Dude, maybe you don’t need to go to college”

“He should have stayed in the car”

I keep seeing this come up in the discussion regarding the George Zimmerman case - “He should have stayed in the car.” That line sums up the totality of the liberal mindset. This is a bigger thing than one altercation that the media blew way out of proportion (given the scale of more clear cut murders happening elsewhere in the country but I digress). The mindset believes that the state is the ultimate authority, that the state is there to take care of us, and therefore we need to concede all authority to the state. In other words

Go home, cower in your closet and we will tell you when its safe to come out (if ever). Then go back to your closet until we call you again.

I just don’t understand the mindset that if anyone sees something out of the ordinary that we should avoid interaction at all costs and wait for the cavalry to come. Most of the time its nothing and no harm no foul. When its not nothing, maybe you can help mitigate the situation before the police show up after their average response time elapses – like scaring off the burglar instead of just describing to the police what your TV used to look like. That is not vigilantism, its awareness and being visible.

Bad guys, for the most part, like to do their thing when no one is around. If we all hide in the closet, they will think no one is around.

The homemade plastic gun has arrived

Defense Distributed has hand fired the first ever 3-D printed plastic gun. And the politicians are having a fit. The entire point of the project is an exercise to prove that technology makes certain classes of laws moot over time.

The irony is thick in Rep Steve Israel’s reaction to the news. He wants to extend the existing limitations on homemade weapons

Security checkpoints, background checks, and gun regulations will do little good if criminals can print plastic firearms at home [my emphasis]

Did you catch that? We have to tell criminals not to print plastic firearms because otherwise the gun regulations will not work. Doh!

91% support background checks? Yes, but why?

You always have to look at the whole data set from multiple angles. Lets take

Do you support or oppose - requiring background checks for all gun buyers? 91% said yes, 8% said no

and compose that with

Do you believe that if there are background checks for all gun purchases the government will or will not use that information in the future to confiscate legally-owned guns? 48% said confiscate, 38% said will not

Lets put those two things together.

Even if we assumed that all the people against background checks believed they would lead to confiscation, and peel them off the list, that still leaves 40% of the people polled who are both in favor of checks and also believe it will lead to confiscation.

If you think that checks will lead (not might lead, will lead) to confiscation, why would you be for checks… because you want the guns confiscated.

If they think the guns should be confiscated, why are we even debating them about background checks. They don’t care about background checks. Those people are not trying to keep guns out of criminals hands, they are trying to keep guns out of everyone's hands. So this 91% stat is misleading at best, and useless at worst.

Either that, or there is some serious cognitive dissonance going on and if that’s the case, the poll is invalid on its face.

In the spirit of “trust but verify” here is the original poll that everyone is citing.

Occupy court verdicts a mostly positive thing

A friend posted on facebook a list of 5 recent court verdicts for the Occupy folks. I agree with 4 of these. Can you guess which 4?

1. Not Guilty: the jury agreed with the protesters that the message of the protest was important enough to override the trespassing charges
2. Not Guilty: Independent video footage showed the arresting officer lied after the police claimed no police footage existed.
3. Not Guilty: three undercover Austin police officers had infiltrated the Occupy group and goaded the protesters into this act
4. Not Guilty: the park’s supposed curfew law was enforced rarely and inconsistently, meaning the police’s crackdown was a targeted attempt to infringe on First Amendment Rights
5. Not Guilty: basically the same as #4

Now 2-5 all make sense. Inconsistent laws and overzealous (to be generous) police need to be held in check. But personal property rights do not. Does #1 mean that I can now go Occupy the Occupier’s home’s living room because I disagree with him?

Feinstein’s justification is also a sham

I know it is but I have a hard time believing this is the whole of her justification for instituting a new weapons ban (or actually that anyone buys it). From her summary

A Justice Department study of the assault weapons ban found that it was responsible for a 6.7% decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal.

This looks like a very good “hard fact” but the very next line in the exact same study says

However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban.

Get that? It says, there was a decrease in gun murders (note: not in overall murders) but its possible it just normal variation because its so small. She cites a study that is wishy-washy on its face because they are showing a trend with a single data point (1 year). You can’t show a trend with a single data point. Especially one small enough to be natural variation.

Don’t you think if there was a better study to cite, she would?

I’m not going to bother to quote the rest of her reasons that she claims “Assault weapon bans have been proven to be effective” I’ll summarize:

When we banned these guns, these guns were seen to be used less in the crimes we were concerned about. The police also noticed a drop in the rate that these guns were confiscated from criminals. We do not have any data that the crimes we were concerned with happened any less frequently or lessened their impact on civil society. The crimes still happened, they just didn’t happen with these specific guns anymore.

All of the data they show is that they took away the guns. Hey look! We banned them! Then we found people used them less! Huzzah!

They don’t have any data (because there isn't any) that shows that banning guns is effective for anything except banning guns.

If you think this way, how could you possibly give anyone a weapon?

• Man tells city council not to ban his gun.
• Man tells city council he has a carry permit
• Councilman asks if man is carrying
• Man says yes
• Councilman makes a motion to (illegally) remove the man from the meeting
• Motion fails
• Councilman immediately excuses himself out of fear of being in a room with a gun.
• Mayor apologizes to man for councilman’s attempt to restrict his 2nd amendment rights

Kudos to the mayor, but the most interesting thing here is that the councilman appears to be making a hasty retreat in the politest fashion out of fear that a firearm exists in his vicinity.
The fact that the council man immediately gets up and leaves the meeting before it is over betrays the thinking behind most gun control legislators. They believe that the average man is an animal. That he is subservient to his basest instincts and has no self control or morality. That he is eventually going to get hopping mad and use it in a fit of rage.